The Gospel According to Charlie Brown?
Sermon — September 13, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
On December 16, 1956, a young woman made American cultural history with a nothing but a football, a helmet, and a dream. In the eyes of the world, her job that day was simply to hold the ball for a kicker. And she did. As the kicker ran forward at full speed, she carefully held the ball in place; as his leg swung back, she remained focused on the plan; and then, as the kicker’s foot flew forward, she pulled the ball away, and—WHOMP. History was made. For the first time ever, Lucy van Pelt had pulled the ball away from the swinging foot of a gullible young kicker named Charlie Brown.
In the Peanuts comic strip every subsequent autumn from 1956 to 1998, Lucy played that trick again. As the years passed, and Charlie Brown grew neither older nor wiser, Lucy repeated the same football gag, with endless variations. Every year, she had a new explanation for why this year would be different. “You’re truly amazing!” she says to Charlie one year, as he pumps himself up to try again. “You talk the talk and you walk the walk!” Run run run run aaaaaah! “But you don’t kick the kick.”
Lord, if my friend pulls the football away when I try to kick it, how many times should I forgive? As many as seven times? Not seven times, I tell you, Charlie Brown, but seventy-seven times.
Peter comes to Jesus and asks him, “If my brother sins against me,”—the version I just read translation “brother” as “another member of the church”—“If my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive?” Conventional wisdom says that you should forgive someone once, if that. (“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me…”) Some ancient rabbis suggested that you should forgive up to three times. Peter tries to be unusually merciful. “As many as seven times, Lord?”
“Not seven times,” Jesus answers him, “but seventy-seven times.” And this seems to turn forgiveness into a Charlie-Brown situation. Someone wrongs you again and again and again, and you forgive them again and again and again, and still you come back for more. And that raises an awkward question. We know that we’re supposed to practice forgiveness. We pray every week for God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But is our life really supposed to resemble a 50-year-long running joke in a comic strip?
I don’t think that’s quite what Jesus means. There’s a difference between forgiveness and gullibility. The point of the football gag isn’t that Charlie forgives Lucy, again and again, for what she’s done. It’s that he’s oblivious, or optimistic, or in denial about what she’s about to do. If Charlie Brown had gone to his priest and said, “Father, I know that Jesus tells us to forgive seventy-seven times. The last forty times I’ve tried to kick a football, Lucy van Pelt has pulled it away, and I’ve fallen flat on my behind. And I’ve forgiven her every time. Should I try to kick the ball again?” then the answer, of course, is no. Charlie Brown, do not try to kick that ball. Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting yourself be hurt again. It means refraining from taking revenge, and then letting go of resentment and anger about the past. Charlie shouldn’t trip Lucy in return; and he shouldn’t stew about the prank for the rest of the year. But he also probably shouldn’t try to kick the football again the next fall.
But there is a sense of inevitability in what Jesus says. None of us will act like Charlie Brown. But most of us will find that we need to forgive the same people time and again. The closer they are to us, the more often we’ll need to forgive. And that’s really what Peter means. In the original Greek text, Peter’s question is a little less like “If my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive him?” and a little more like “How many times will this happen: that my brother will sin against me, and I will forgive him?” There’s nothing hypothetical about it; if someone is as close to you as a brother or a sister, a spouse or a close friend, they will sin against you, and you will need to forgive. You can probably come up with examples in your life. Jesus’ point is that life will be full of these small sins; too many to remember, in fact. Not one or three or seven but seventy-seven; and who’s really keeping track by then?
But then Jesus tells a very specific story about a man who is forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents and then refuses to forgive a debt of a hundred denarii. And this is really a story about the scale of things. A denarius was a day’s wage for an ordinary laborer, so a hundred denarii is a significant debt: it’s more than three months’ pay. The debtor asks for time to put the money together; he doesn’t have the savings to pay the loan back, any more than most people could pay their mortgage off on demand.
But the one who loaned him the money has no mercy. He has him thrown into jail. And because we’ve heard the story, we know this is hypocrisy; this man has just been forgiven a great debt. But the magnitude of the difference isn’t obvious at first. A talent was six thousand denarii; so this ten-thousand-talent debt is worth sixty million days’ wages, 164,000 worker-years. It would be hard for the second man to pay off a 100-denarius debt; it would take at least a year to scrimp and save. But it would be impossible for the first man to repay that 10,000-talent debt. The first man has been forgiven a debt he could never repay; and yet he holds as tightly as he can onto the debt that he is owed.
When Jesus tells us that we need to forgive one another seventy-seven times, it’s not because he wants a church of Charlie Browns, endlessly forgiving but also kind of pathetic. It’s because in God’s eyes, we’re like the man in this parable: we owe a debt that we could never repay, and that debt has been forgiven, and yet we hold on tight to debts that are worth just a fraction of that.
You’ve probably heard the idea that we should forgive other people when they wrong us, because we know that we have wronged other people, and we’ve needed to be forgiven. It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgive “one another, as God in Christ forgave you,” Paul writes. (Eph. 4:32) In a way, this is just a variation on the Golden Rule.
But this parable isn’t that. This isn’t about forgiving other people as we have needed to be forgiven. The scales all wrong. Show of hands: Who among you has ever done something so wrong that it would take you 164,000 years to repay the debt? (…I was a little nervous someone was going to raise their hand.)
If this parable is going to apply to any of us, I don’t think that’s the kind of debt he means.
But I’m reminded of the words of Psalm 49: “We can never ransom ourselves, or deliver to God the price of our life; For the ransom of our life is so great, that we should never have enough to pay it, In order to live for ever and ever, and never see the grave.” (49:6-8)
As far as I can tell, that’s simply true. Life is priceless. There is no amount that I can pay for immortality. And it cost me nothing to be born. To feed and clothe and house myself, these things cost money of course. But life itself is a completely free gift, a huge debt I could never repay that’s already been forgiven.
And yet I spend my life keeping track of much smaller things: who washed which dishes when, and who sat on the couch; who hurt my feelings how and whether they ever apologized. I tally them up in the ledger I keep in my mind, as if I’ll show up on Judgment Day and present God with the results: Look, I know that I committed 300 denarii worth of minor sins, but I actually forgave 400 worth, and look, I have receipts; so… we good?
Most of our minds work like this sometimes, and when they do, we’re completely missing the point. We have been given invaluable gifts. We’ve been given the gift of life. We’ve been forgiven when we have gone wrong. In this parable, Jesus challenges us to avoid hypocrisy, it’s true; he encourages us to forgive one another, as we have been forgiven. But he also invites us to recognize the gift and grace of this life, and live it not with resentment, or obligation, but with gratitude instead.
